If your organization conducts employee engagement surveys, there’s something you really need to know: Never ask a question you don’t know how to fix. Sounds simple, right? Well, some of the most common engagement survey questions violate this simple rule (and one of your survey questions might be on this list).
It’s cliché to say that "this is year is different." But I think most of us would agree that, yeah, this year is actually kind of different. And it’s not just all the political and societal changes we face; businesses are going to see changes, especially when it comes to their employees.
Dan is a senior financial analyst and, in his mind, he’s the best one on the team. But according to his boss, while it’s true that Dan’s financial skills are very good, his emotional intelligence is virtually nonexistent. And Dan’s coworkers would describe him as smart but also narcissistic, abrasive and tone-deaf.
High performers need positive feedback; they do a great job and they should have that acknowledged. However, phrases like “great job” or “nice work” are so vague as to be virtually useless. And in some cases, they may even do harm.
It’s become cliché to assert that having high emotional intelligence equals better performance at work. But I’m going to shock you, because the link between emotional intelligence and job performance is wildly overstated.
In fact, research suggests that in certain jobs, having higher emotional intelligence is actually correlated with lower job performance!
Momma always told me that watching television and movies would rot my brain. Well, now I’ve got a great counter-argument to that, because there’s an exercise for developing emotional intelligence that involves watching television.
Emotional intelligence is just as important as traditional intelligence.
Most executives I study are driven by power or achievement (or some combination of the two). Power-driven people want to be in charge and they want authority to make decisions that will impact others. By contrast, achievement-driven people are more thrilled by accomplishing difficult tasks, even if no one else notices. 
Teaching attitude is something that a lot of leaders give up on before they even try. They say “Pat just is the way he is. He’s a little cranky, and he’s a little sarcastic, but I can’t do much about that.” But when you look at great leaders, they do teach attitude, and so can you.
Given the huge amounts of information most of us have to cram into our presentations, getting people to remember everything is a tall order.
Now, we all have different presentation styles and different ways of making our message memorable.
When I go into organizations and I ask the employees “tell me why your team exists?” the most frequent response I hear is “I don’t really know.” This certainly isn’t great news, but it does help clarify one of my recent research findings that only 23% of employees say their leader always communicates their vision clearly. 
